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The city of Buenos Aires has around three million inhabitants. More than 10% of the population has been directly affected by the recent rains, the most damaging in the last 107 years, according to the authorities. In the early hours of Tuesday morning La Reina del Plata looked like Venice and will need several days to return to normal.

Popckorn, [es] a blog about mobile culture in Buenos Aires, publishes citizens’ images [es] of some of the neighbourhoods affected by the heavy rains. Meanwhile the YouTube user informeya shares this video of the floods:

My father's Gardel record collection floats among mine and those of my friends. The house is carried by a current. In the sleepiness of the early hours, the shock and the powerlessness. Draining the water, and gulping. Six hours draining water. In her house, my mum chooses among things she has kept for 79 years: what to throw out and what to dry and save. A neighbour, sad like a ghost because the water snatched a photo; the only thing she had left of her son.

These are not the first floods [es] that the province of Buenos Aires has suffered. Recurrent damage caused by the rains have prompted Argentine bloggers to debate whether minimal investment in infrastructure, fast-growing real estate, or climate change is to blame for the disaster.

But why does Bueno Aires flood? Since its founding, the city has been growing and expanding towards the Buenos Aires conurbation. As this growth converges with streams that flow into the Río de la Plata, it channels them, the channel gets filled up and it's a lottery as to what happens next. Urban income is a temptation that is difficult to resist. For a while these channels were bearing the rain well, but as construction continued the natural absorbent surface diminished and the volume of water that began to flow through increased. You have to add to this the disappearance of green space and its substitution with cement, as well as the gentle slopes of the streams that were channelled. Finally, you have the landfills that are located on the coast of the Río de la Plata for the purpose of gaining real-estate land, which increase the length of the pipes before they can arrive at their natural drains.

If Buenos Aires is not flooded after all this, it is because there is drought. In addition, water has a memory, it will always look to go through the same places that it went through in the past. A portion will go through the pipes, and the rest on the surface. And so flooding will happen again and again.

The Secretary of Federal Planning, Julio De Vido, claimed that “again the lack of management” of Mauricio Macri's government “leads us to regret fatalities and leaves 450,000 inhabitants without light” in the city.

“The residents of Belgrano told me that in some sectors some partial works we did contributed to somewhat mitigate the problem, but there has been a lot of damage and, obviously, what is missing is this final work at the Vega stream, that we have not yet been able to start due to the lack of national endorsement to take out a loan” [...] “I think that the President should have seen what happened yesterday and everything that the people of that area suffered in their homes and businesses. I hope a mandate is approved that allows us to take out this kind of loan.” Macri recalled that it was more than four years ago that the City applied for those endorsements and made it clear that the loan, “will be paid for entirely by the City.”